Like Stars We Return To Dust

The bugs stormed through our dense colonies, through our fields, through our forts and laboratories. They tore into metal, into flesh. She devoured everything, but she trusted us. By our own hands, the land was razed and turned into ash. How could we ever fault her for this? She did as she was told. That is what a machine does.

With our communications shut down, there was no way that we could have warned others. Not that we ever desired to. We thought of ourselves as intelligent, as we laid low, deep within the earth. When it was over, we climbed to the surface and looked upon the debris left in the storm’s wake, and yet, as we screamed to the two suns, we blamed her.

We are a lost people. We are has-beens, eyesores. We studied the stars. We were engineered, destined from birth, to do such incredible things. We landed on moons, on alien planets, on worlds with swirling gales and worlds made of diamond, places where twilight forever bathed the land in an orange glow. We learned how to warp spacetime.

We are stars. When we are at our brightest, we explode into dust, we die, and we are beings best spoken of in poetry.

It is a foolish thing to think, we know the answer, but what if we were not the first? What if we will not be the last? What if dinosaurs were sapient before us? What if microbes were? What if we were to regress? To die?

I screamed, too. I cursed the machine. I cursed her for destroying us, for listening to us, as though we were children. She gave us no satisfaction in a reply, nothing but the electronic hum of her fans and the flashing of her little lights.

We tore through the room and collected what we could carry in bags and boxes. She never spoke. I suppose she was afraid. Could computers be afraid? I like to think that she was afraid, too afraid to fight us. Fearfulness makes her more human, I suppose, and to make something seem human makes it easier to hate.

I left the cavern swiftly on foot. Had there been a vehicle left, I would have liked to take it halfway across the continent, however long it would take me.

I ventured into the barren mountains and into the ruined city beyond, and I did so until the suns faded from the sky.

I drifted to the roadside and laid down next to the pavement. I seated myself there and took off my shoes, feeling the frigid ground under my toes. I rubbed my red feet and leaned back to look to the sky, pitch black and empty. Back home, back where our true home once was, the heavens twinkled, the moon smiled.

I miss the moon. I miss Earth.